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  Hunter turned his almost laserlike vision out past the ring of Norsemen, out beyond the waves and gray-blue swells of the sea. Something was out there, and it was flying their way.

  Suddenly he saw it. Just a dark, winged speck, skimming barely a foot or two above the waves, a thin line of flame and smoke trailing behind.

  “See it?” Hunter said, shaking Fitz and directing his attention toward the incoming craft.

  Fitz had to squint for a few moments before picking up the dot against the mass of ocean.

  “God, what the hell could that be?” he asked.

  Hunter already knew. It was the remotely piloted vehicle he had seen briefly over the village of Nauset right after the raiders’ attack.

  What happened next would be one of the most terrifying moments in either of the men’s lives.

  The RPV came straight at them until it reached the shoreline. Then it did a quick bank and headed right over the circle of raiders. Climbing slightly, it went into a tight orbit about two hundred feet above the heads of the bewildered Finnbogi.

  Suddenly, another kind of warning went off in Hunter’s brain.

  “Christ! Fitz, order everyone to take cover!” he yelled almost directly into his friend’s ear.

  Fitz had been friends with Hunter for years—long enough to know that in circumstances when Hunter made such sudden requests, it was always wise to follow up on them, no matter how bizarre they might seem at the time.

  So recovering quickly from the ringing in his ears, Fitz began screaming through the bullhorn for all of the Football City troops to take cover—and quick! Meanwhile, Hunter had grabbed Fitz’s walkie-talkie and was broadcasting the same message to the Delaware militiamen on the dunes to the south.

  The next thing they knew, an absolutely horrifying screech pierced the morning air. Hunter dared to look up just as the trio of projectiles were clearing the horizon. They looked white—as in white-hot—and they were trailing three long streaks of deep red smoke.

  He quickly saw that as soon as the bone-chilling screech appeared, the RPV had gone into a steep climb. Now the small aircraft had suddenly zoomed out to sea, its small engine sputtering, yet providing enough power to allow the little drone to clear the area.

  Within an instant the screeching was so intense, Hunter and the others covered their ears in a vain attempt to block out the frightening sound.

  The last thing Hunter saw before Fitz dragged him back down to cover was the small band of ravens scattering away from the beach.

  The projectiles landed squarely on the circle of Finnbogi Norsemen just two seconds later.

  Hunter had never been in an earthquake before.

  But he couldn’t imagine any kind of tremor being more violent or frightening than the ground shaking that occurred immediately after the three shells hit the shoreline at Slaughter Beach.

  He and Fitz were thrown at least a hundred feet back, both of them slamming into the side of another sand dune only to be covered with a barrage of sand and seawater thrown up by the enormous explosion. Hunter quickly pushed himself up and out of the pile of sand, but for a frightening few moments, he couldn’t find Fitz. Digging frantically with both hands, he finally located first a boot, then a pant leg, and finally the belt and holster Fitz always wore. Pulling with all his might on the belt, Hunter was able to yank the squat fireplug frame of Fitzgerald out of the blackened, dirty sand.

  Typically, the Irishman still had his cigar in his mouth.

  “Mother of God!” Fitzgerald stammered, checking his various body parts to make sure everything was still in place. “Am I really alive?”

  By this time, Hunter was up on his knees and brushing the sand from his own eyes. Oddly enough, it appeared as if there were thousands of diamonds on the ground around him. He managed to pick up a handful and saw that they were actually small pieces of glass. The blast on the beach had been so intense and the heat it generated so extreme, that it had actually fused together grains of sand to make millions of diamond-shaped glasslets.

  His head still ringing, his mind still disoriented from the shock of the blast, Hunter finally managed to pick himself up and look back toward the beach.

  The dune where he and Fitz had been stationed was long gone. From where he was now, he had a clear line of sight to the shoreline.

  The Norsemen were gone, too. All that remained was a gigantic, smoking crater at least a hundred feet deep and three times that around that was quickly being filled up by the incoming tide.

  “Was it one ours?” Fitz asked, his voice still shaky, his face encrusted in sand.

  But Hunter did not hear the question. Already he was running back through the remaining dunes, past the scores of Football City Rangers who were also just picking themselves up from the blast, back to his Harrier jumpjet.

  Fitz had to think a moment as to why Hunter was so intent on getting airborne. But then looking back at the crater, he found his answer circling tightly about a hundred feet above the hole.

  It was the RPV, back to survey the damage. Fitz watched intently as the drone orbited the crater three more times, and then did a sharp bank to the east. With a puff of smoke popping from its engine, the drone then accelerated quickly and zoomed back out to sea.

  Less than a minute later, Hunter’s jumpjet roared overhead in hot pursuit.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  YAZ WIPED THE FLOOD of perspiration from his forehead and leaned back against the bulkhead.

  What I would do, he thought, for just one lousy glass of beer.

  It was more than a hundred degrees inside the power chamber of the Norse sub, and the clammy, oily smell in the air made the heat that much more unbearable. Before Yaz sat a huge, disassembled gear clutch and its hydraulic pump system. Two of the four gaskets that helped seat the clutchworks had worn out, releasing a stream of hydraulic fluid into the sub’s power transmission gears. This fluid, in turn, became heated by the motion of the transmission itself, cooked itself into a large sticky mass, and literally gummed up the works.

  This is why the sub had not been able to make more than five knots an hour even though its turbines had been running full blast.

  It had taken Yaz more than a day just to take the clutch apart. Now he wasn’t sure if he had the wherewithal to put it all back together again and make it work. If he did, then he believed that the men on the boat would come to value him even more than now.

  But what would happen to him if he didn’t? Just one look at the man sitting across the room from him gave him that answer.

  The man was a Britisher ironically nicknamed “Smiley.” He had no hands, no ears, and no tongue. They were all gone, lopped-off months before by the captain of the boat when Smiley wasn’t able to fix one of the vessel’s auxiliary turbines within a twenty-four-hour deadline.

  Before the mutilation, Smiley had served as the boat’s chief engineer, signing on with the crew after the raiders—they being members of the Godthaab clan—attacked his village on the Isle of Wight. After finding out that Smiley had spent ten years aboard Royal Navy subs, the Godthaabs had made him an offer in their typically peculiar fashion: Join us or we’ll kill you. Smiley joined.

  For a while he’d enjoyed rank and privilege second only to the captain. But when the turbine went down and he couldn’t fix it in a day’s time, the captain went a-hacking with his knife, reducing Smiley to a partially deaf, handless wretch.

  As Yaz eventually learned, the taking of Smiley’s tongue had been an afterthought on the part of the captain. While he was in the good graces of the captain and crew, Smiley had learned many things about the Godthaabs—who they were, who supplied them with their boats, and why they were attacking the North American Continent—information only the captain himself was privy to. As soon as he fell out of favor, the captain realized that Smiley knew too much, and that he might one day tell all to someone else. So the tongue came out.

  But, oddly enough, just why the captain didn’t kill Smiley outright was starting to
make some sense to Yaz.

  The murals on the walls of the vessel told it all: In the world of these strange foreigners, how one died was extremely important. The paintings depicted raiders dying violently yet courageously. It was clear that, to their eyes, there was no better way to go.

  Conversely, it was counterproductive to allow an enemy to die in a manner that might be construed as courageous. This is why moments after the captain had slashed Smiley, the vessel’s doctor had the victim in the sick bay stitched up, receiving medication, and on the road to relative recovery.

  It was another oddity in the raiders’ way of thinking that brought Yaz and Smiley together. Smiley was supposed to be helping Yaz work on the huge clutchworks. But with no hands to hold tools and no tongue to speak with, there was little the man could be expected to do besides sit and watch.

  Yet Smiley was an indomitable character. Just because the captain had relieved him of his hands, ears, and tongue, this didn’t mean that he couldn’t communicate. He still had some hearing left, and this allowed him and Yaz to have many long conversations, via the simple language of Morse code.

  They had discovered this mode of communication almost by accident. Yaz had needed Smiley to hold a screwdriver in place while he disconnected the myriad of bolts on the clutch assembly. Using a piece of twine, he had tied the screwdriver to Smiley’s right-arm stump and the work went on. But when it came time for Yaz to remove the tool, Smiley made it very clear that he was opposed to the action. That’s when he started tapping out messages in Morse Code.

  Not being able to communicate directly with a civilized human being for six months, Smiley did a fair amount of gabbing, via frantically rapid tapping. But Yaz didn’t mind; with each conversation, Smiley provided him with a wealth of information.

  For instance, the Englishman confirmed Yaz’s suspicion that the raiders were, in fact, reincarnated Norsemen. The great boats themselves had been built with the help of a Norwegian ship designer named Svenson. This man had owned one of the largest and most profitable shipworks in postwar Europe before someone in league with the Norsemen bought him out for an outrageous amount of gold.

  Guilt-ridden and plagued with remorse, Svenson later committed suicide, but not before he had revealed all the secrets to building the huge subs—quickly and economically—to the people acting for the Morse.

  The reason why the subs were, on one hand, so efficient, yet, on the other, so unsophisticated was simple: They were built like the famous American liberty ships of World War II. That was, on a kind of assembly-line process, using generic designs, forms, and castings, from the propellers right down to the nuts and bolts. The building process was so elementary that much of the work was done by relatively unskilled labor; anyone who was smart enough to weld Joint A to Joint B could work on the project.

  Or as Smiley tapped it, building the huge subs involved “the rational use of a large quantity of unskilled labor building a complex device by way of highly simplified design.”

  It was not a new idea: the pyramids had been built in exactly the same way.

  Nor was there a need for an enormous shipyard in which to build the subs. Because everything was so simplified—no one piece of steel was big enough or heavy enough that two men couldn’t carry it easily, for instance—the huge subs could be constructed in rather primitive settings. So even though some were assembled in Svenson’s boatworks, many more were built on the beaches of Norway’s many shallow fjords.

  Smiley claimed that he had seen as many as twenty of the big boats together in one place at one time. However, he had been told that there were as many as sixty or more of the vessels operating in the North Atlantic. Not all of them were used to simply transport raiders. Some hauled coal and supplies for the raiding ships, others simply functioned as transfer vessels for kidnapped victims or captured booty. Still others carried scouting parties and saboteurs; advance troops that could be landed quickly and quietly to recon or prepare a certain target for a later assault.

  It was all valuable intelligence, just the sort of stuff that had led the boat’s captain to take such drastic action against Smiley in the first place. But despite his nonstop tap rap, there were some things that Smiley was holding back. Once, during a meal break, he had let slip that he had some even more frightening information concerning the raiders’ floating army.

  Yaz knew immediately from the man’s dead-serious demeanor that the information was very hot. Yet Smiley would say no more. That had been thirty-six hours ago. Now, on this early morning, with the clutchworks almost done, Yaz gathered up all his talents of persuasion and gently but firmly pressed the Brit to tell him the secret.

  After much cajoling, the mute man agreed.

  Tapping quietly and slowly, Smiley told Yaz that he had heard of a squad of four very special subs, ones whose mission had been kept ominously cloaked in mystery.

  Called the Fire Bats—literally, “four boats” in Norwegian—Smiley said these vessels were worlds apart from the huge, hulking troop and supply boats. Built secretly deep within the bowels of Svenson’s shipyard, the Fire Bats were smaller, sleeker, and much more sophisticated. As such, they had been built for a purpose other than just carrying raiders to the American East Coast or hauling slaves and booty away.

  What that exact purpose was, Smiley didn’t know. What he did know was that the Fire Bats were more elaborate inside and out than the big subs because their interiors were filled with equipment salvaged from US and Soviet nuclear submarines that had been damaged or abandoned during World War III.

  This equipment, chillingly enough, included systems capable of launching nuclear missiles.

  Yaz had no doubts that Smiley was telling him the truth. Only a fool would have spent more than an hour painstakingly tapping out a lie. And his information worked its sobering effect on Yaz quite quickly. Raiding parties of modern barbarians was one thing. Those same barbarians cruising around with nuclear launch capability was quite another.

  Despite the heat and the smell and Smiley’s incessant tapping, Yaz finally managed to put the sub’s transmission gear and pump back together about an hour later.

  He sent a message to the captain, who arrived inside the stuffy power chamber several minutes later to watch the tryout of the repair job himself. Taking full note of the officer’s long, razor-sharp knife, Yaz took one deep breath and switched on the sub’s power-transfer electric generator, the piece of equipment which actually ran the clutch assembly.

  To his enormous relief, the clutch moved and the transmission went back to working perfectly right away.

  The captain immediately put a bear hug on Yaz that near suffocated him. The officer even tapped Smiley on the head after Yaz mentioned the man had helped greatly in the repair.

  The captain then told Yaz that a man with his knowledge of sub workings was valuable to them all. Thus, his talents were needed elsewhere.

  With that, he was led away from the cramped, stifling room, leaving Smiley only enough time to tap out a hasty good-bye.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  IT DIDN’T TAKE HUNTER MORE than a few minutes to get a visual sighting on the RPV.

  After launching from the dunes behind Slaughter Beach, he simply followed the thin trail of dirty brown exhaust the small drone had left behind. Moving at a speed of 240 mph, he quickly spotted the craft skimming along the waves heading dead east. Within another twenty seconds he was practically right above it. Then, throttling back to 100 mph, he was able to match its speed.

  Taking up a position slightly above and behind the RPV, Hunter knew the easy part was over. Now a bigger mystery remained: Who was controlling the RPV?

  The question itself was fraught with implications which, in turn, led to other questions. The RPV was obviously linked with the massive bombardment that had simply obliterated the force of Norsemen trapped on Slaughter Beach. Were the three projectiles which caused the blast actually shot at the Norsemen? Or had they been fired in their support and simply fell short of
hitting the American troops on the dunes beyond? Had the same thing happened back at Nauset: when a similar explosion—it, too coming on the heels of a RPV flyover—destroyed a smaller force of raiders?

  More important, who had the ability these days to deliver so much firepower? Short of seeing a nuclear device itself being detonated, the massive explosions were by far the most violent Hunter had ever witnessed.

  As always, his head was filled with theories, but intuition and experience told Hunter that he’d be wise not to jump to conclusions. War was seldom a clear-cut division of right and wrong.

  He did know that the RPV was a classic battlefield drone ship, with a TV camera in its nose that was capable of either sending back live pictures of a battle in progress or performing poststrike recon by videotaping the battlefield for viewing once the drone was recaptured.

  More importantly, he also knew that the range of small aircraft was not much more than a hundred miles, which meant that its mother ship could be no more than fifty miles off the coast.

  Keeping one eye on the RPV, Hunter slowly raised the Harrier up to ten thousand feet and scanned the eastern horizon. All he could see was a single fishing boat making its way in a northerly direction approximately thirty miles from his position.

  At that moment his radio crackled to life.

  It was Fitz, calling him from the Football City Ranger outpost back in Milford. The Irishman reported that while none of the Norsemen survived the enormous blast, it had caused only minor injuries—blown-out eardrums mostly—to the Football City troops and the Delaware militiamen.

  Hunter then briefed Fitz on his intent to track the RPV to its source.

  “I’ve got it in sight and tracking due east,” he told the Irishman. “It’s got to land somewhere, sometime soon. I’m going to be there when it does.”

  “Then let me pass on a word of caution,” Fitz replied through the occasional bursts of static. “We were lucky here in Delaware that no damage was done by these bastards …”